The College's Committee on Student Life announced its formal endorsement of the recommendations made in the "Report of the Committee on the First-Year Experience."
The report, issued last spring, proposes changes designed to improve the first-year experience by restructuring the College's residential system, enhancing intellectualism and revising the orientation program.
The Report's recommendations include creating freshmen clusters and permanent residence hall affiliations for upperclass students, constructing 100 additional beds, correlating freshmen seminars and English 5 enrollments with residence assignments and altering the format of orientation week.
The Committee on Student Life endorsed the Report last week "with great enthusiasm," said English Professor Don Pease who chairs COSL, an advisory body to the Dean of the College composed of professors, students and several deans who do not have voting power.
The First-Year Report is currently still in the discussion stage. The College's Board of Trustees will make the final decision about the report's recommendations and, if approved, the changes could take effect in 1998 or 1999.
Throughout the term, Dean of the College Lee Pelton said he has met with a numerous students in small groups to discuss the report and its proposals.
Pelton said many students with whom he has talked do not fully understand the 31-page report at first, but agree with its proposals once he explains it to them.
He said COSL's endorsement followed a successful faculty meeting last week.
"I've come away from the meeting and the Committee on Student Life with a wonderful sense of a Dartmouth faculty that understands that a student's education here goes beyond the classroom and they seek to support programs that increase student-faculty interaction," he said.
Pelton said most people he talked to, including students, administrators and professors, agreed on the report's three main goals.
"The report's goals are to broaden the prevailing social norm, provide increased continuity for students in upperclass years and to enrich and enliven the defining experiences of student life experienced with each other and faculty," he said.
Freshmen Dean Peter Goldsmith also said he thinks most people agree on the goals of the report.
"People sign on to the principles and impulses of the plan," Goldsmith said. "If people get stuck on things, it's with the implementation."
Goldsmith said he saw the report's goals as improving faculty-student interaction.
"I still think the most important impulse in the report has to do with the importance of finding creative ways to get the faculty and students to interact outside of the classroom," he said.
Pease said his committee saw the report's greatest strength as combining life in and out of the classroom.
Pease said his committee "thought the possibilities made available to the campus would increase the coherence of the intellectual environment by drawing faculty into dorms, dinner conversations between students and speakers invited to campus."
The Committee on Student Life's main reservation was the potential isolation of freshmen.
But he said the activities that would be held in the freshmen dorms might draw upperclassmen to that area.
Pelton said students he talked to had expressed similar reservations about freshmen dorms, but he said the concerns were exaggerated.
Currently most of the students who occupy College dorms are freshmen and sophomores, he said.
Pelton said freshmen make up 44 percent of the students in dorms. Thirty-nine percent are sophomores. Juniors make up 11 percent and 15 percent are seniors.
"I think Dartmouth students like the way things are," he said. "I think there is an understandable desire to provide a residential system in which students from different classes are interacting."
He said he thinks many students are under the impression that every student knows every other student on campus.
"This is not true," he said. "Students know the people they live with, study with and do activities with."
Students have also raised concerns about freshmen living with other people in their English 5 classes and freshmen seminars.
"Some people latched on to that to say the College was trying to separate students by their SAT scores," he said.
But he said the residential groupings would represent "a cross-section of the College."
The report has components that go beyond freshmen dorms which Pelton said he has discussed with students in small groups.
He said he discussed the recommendations for changes in upperclass residential life in these smaller groups.
Pelton said he thinks the plan to have upperclassmen have an affiliation with the same dorm for sophomore through senior year should give students a greater sense of continuity on a campus where students are often off for extended periods of time.
Goldsmith said this report helps to get around some of the difficulties in creating a residentially based sense of community the D-Plan creates.
In residentially based communities, "there are things you learn about citizenship you can't learn in other places, like compromise, which raises issues students need to work out with each other," Goldsmith said.
Goldsmith said he thinks this report gives the College the opportunity to capitalize on its greatest strength -- the faculty.
Deans often function as mediators more than they should, he said.
"Good deaning requires us to encourage faculty-student interaction and not allow ourselves to function as mediators between the faculty and students," Goldsmith said.
Goldsmith said he though much of this interaction would occur during meals because "everybody has to take out time for meals."
He emphasized that he hoped the students would not feel like the College was trying to get too involved in their lives.
"I think you can be misunderstood when you talk about intellectual life," he said. "No one is interested in ramming intellectualism down people's throats."
He said the integration of intellectualism does not necessarily mean always having academic conversations, but being able to apply argumentation skills in everyday discussions.